Fervent: A Woman's Battle Plan to Serious, Specific, and Strategic Prayer

by Priscilla Shirer

Prayer is the portal that brings the power of heaven down to earth. It is kryptonite to the enemy and to all his ploys against you.

I can’t just go barreling into this fight blindly. I can’t just throw something up against the wall and hope it sticks. I need a plan. Just as you need a plan. A strategy for war.

You write out your prayers so you “won’t forget” . . . won’t forget who the real enemy is won’t forget the One in whom your hope lies won’t forget your real need and dependencies are and later, won’t forget the record of how God responds

In prayer you gain your strength—the power to gird yourself with armor that extinguishes every weapon your enemy wields.

Put on all of God’s armor so that you will be able to stand firm against all strategies of the devil. (Eph. 6:11

He works overtime to destroy the relationships and circumstances you want to preserve.

We pray because our own solutions don’t work and because prayer deploys, activates, and fortifies us against the attacks of the enemy.

Do not fear or be dismayed; tomorrow go out and face them, for the Lord is with you.

In prayer we feel a bolstering that energizes us with holy confidence.

He targets our role as wives, targets our husbands, and targets our children. He brings dissension, infuses tension, unravels our sense of peace with disunity. Because ultimately he wants to destroy our families—all of our families—so that the billboard message they’re designed to project to the world is a picture that is, at best, laughable.

Prayer is how we isolate the real problems.

The fact is this: fear is one of Satan’s primary schemes for crippling God’s people.

Strategize your obedience as diligently as the enemy is strategizing those temptations.

Walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh. (Gal. 5:16)

And the forgiveness you don’t have any desire to give right now can be amazingly enabled through prayer.

If we want to be women of serious, fervent prayer, the Scripture will always lead us here. To forgiveness. In some form. In some fashion. Forgiveness is God’s command.

Prayer helps us stay focused on bigger things, on much more eternal things than the petty stuff that threatens to puff itself up beyond actual size and become some huge deal it doesn’t deserve to be.

Approach God boldly with every single need.